Today, more people than ever are suffering from allergies to dust and particularly, dust mites.
Dust mites, although practically unseen, live all over your home and live on a diet of your dead skin cells. They have been found to be the most common cause of asthma and so it is vital that you keep them to a minimum in your home – especially if someone in the family suffers from allergies already.
Follow these household cleaning tips and you will get rid of these mites and their droppings.
Dust mites like to live in soft furnishings such as carpets, mattresses and even cuddly toys. Make sure that you wash fabrics such as bedding, pet bedding and soft toys regularly. Bedding should be cleaned at least once a week on a hot wash which will kill all of the mites. Duvets and pillows should also be washed at least twice a year.
For carpets, vacuuming regularly should keep dust mites to a minimum but it is worth dry cleaning your carpets occasionally to give the pile a deep clean too. It is a widely held myth that the best option would be to replace your carpets with hard flooring in order to eradicate the mites completely. This is not true however. In fact, having hard flooring gives the dust and mites nothing to cling onto and allows them to be stirred around the room and straight towards the allergy sufferer. Invest in a heap-filter vacuum and you should notice a difference.
When dusting or sweeping it is easy to spread the dust around from one place to another, further irritating your allergies and undoing all of the hard work that you have already done. Try using micro-fibre dusters which act as a magnet to dust rather than stirring it up. Also, using a mop rather than a broom on hard flooring will help to stop the dust spreading around the room.
One of the best household cleaning tips is to keep your home as free from clutter as possible. Not only will this give dust mites fewer places to hide, but it will also make your regular cleaning a much simpler task – and who wouldn’t want that?!
For more household cleaning tips, come back next week.